Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
>
> This whole issue about having global variables in a shareable image
> (VMS-speak)/DLL/.so gives me a bit of a headache. Honestly, it would
> be oh-so-easier to handle if the access was made through functions
> that just returned a pointer to the data.
>
Yes I considered that initially and decided that I didn't want to force
a function call overhead on every access to the ASN1_ITEM structure and
its components.
Having said that, that's what the old stuff did and it didn't suffer too
much. Of course there were *lots* of other unrelated reasons why it, and
everyone who tried to use it, did suffer though :-)
I presume there isn't any issue within the library itself? That is the
accessing of global variables within a shared library by other parts of
it?
What this seems to boil down to is a problem when external
applications want to access the internal stuff. This will currently only
happen if they need to define their own ASN1 modules and access the
library global variables as a result.
Now it would be possible to change the ASN1 code to use either function
pointers or a hybrid of optional function pointers where needed. Since
most of this stuff is implemented and declared through macros this isn't
too painful.
So if the current stuff turns out to be too difficult then there's
always an alternative.
Steve.
--
Dr Stephen N. Henson. http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/
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Core developer of the OpenSSL project: http://www.openssl.org/
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